Remembrance
by Snowballjane
Summary: "Have you forgotten yet?"


Title: Remembrance  
  
Author: Jane  
  
Rating: PG  
  
Beta: The good folks at EWB, with special thanks to Leah, Erin and Mara.  
  
Code: General, everyone  
  
Disclaimer: Star Trek Enterprise is the property of Paramount  
  
Notes: Siegfried Sassoon's poem 'Aftermath' is a major influence on this story.  
  
Summary: "Have you forgotten yet?"  
  
  
  
The final notes of the Last Post sounded over the comm and died away as Ensign Owen lifted the bugle away from his lips. Every member of crew stood to attention, either one pace back from their work stations or in the messhall where the off-duty staff had gathered. The ship fell silent, except for the ever-present thrum of the life support systems.  
  
+++++++  
  
He remembered the first Veteran's Day parade he had attended. Scrubbed and polished in his Boy Scout's uniform he had been an escort to the color guard. They had stood in the rain for hours, holding the flag with pride. He understood now why the eyes of the oldest men had sought out the trefoil Scouting flag. The banners they had fought for were gone, the world marched on under strange flags, and few familiar things remained.  
  
Be prepared. The scout's motto was never more relevant than here in space, where just about anything could happen. Yet he had found he wasn't truly prepared to deal with losing members of his crew. As captain he had had to give two funeral orations this year, two young men would rest for eternity in this foreign star field.  
  
There had been no criticism from Starfleet. Jonathan Archer knew that he could so easily have lost more people by now. They had been astoundingly lucky. There had been acts of bravery and acts of sheer stupidity and yet they had come out largely unscathed. Still he found himself running over the events of that day, replaying a thousand different things he could have done differently, in another life. In this life, Fisher and Martens remained dead.  
  
Ship morale appeared to be high, but he suspected the losses preyed on everyone's mind from time to time. They would lose more people, he thought. It was inevitable. He glanced around at the bridge crew, he was afraid of losing any one of them.  
  
A Scout can face danger even if he is afraid. He has the courage to stand for what he thinks is right..  
  
..even to the death.  
  
++++++  
  
Trip worried. Every so often his eyes would drift down from their straight- forward-at-attention position to check the readings being sent up from main engineering. It was all very well to remember, he thought, but the here and now was the main thing.  
  
The coolant systems had been playing merry hell with the engineers all morning. They had jury-rigged the system to be sure that everyone could safely step away from their station during the minute's silence, but Trip knew he wouldn't be happy until the problem was fixed.  
  
Beside him he noticed Malcolm subtly shift position. The man was standing even more at attention than he had been a moment ago.  
  
Trip felt a twinge of guilt. He knew that Archer had intended for everyone to take this ceremony seriously. But he couldn't help it. All he wanted right now was to keep everyone here alive.  
  
++++++  
  
There were neither sunrises nor sunsets in space, thought Malcolm, but still here they stood, remembering.  
  
He was ambushed by a memory from a holiday years ago.  
  
He had visited a small church in the Austrian alps while on a school ski- ing trip. Tucked away in a corner, half-hidden behind a wilting flower arrangement, was a small wooden board. Tiny photographs were attached to it, almost disintegrated with time. Young men in black and white photographs in the recognisable  
  
uniforms of the Third Reich stared out from the board, each labelled in barely legible thick black gothic script.  
  
  
  
In 200 years no-one had ever be able to bring themselves to throw it away, but they hadn't really wanted to remember the young men either. They were something to be ashamed of, to try to pretend hadn't happened.  
  
But they had died too, for war's a bloody game.  
  
They had been mistaken or foolish or maybe just afraid of the consequences of refusing to fight, but they too had lost the chance of a long life and a death surrounded by grandchildren. If the victors wrote the history books, they also carved the war memorials.  
  
Malcolm knew he was a willing killer. He glanced around at his colleagues standing to attention on the bridge of the ship and knew he would use every power at his disposal to defend the Enterprise and to protect Earth. But when all was said and done, would his name be carved on any memorial? Would he be on the winning side?  
  
Fallen enemies, he thought. They too should be remembered.  
  
+++++  
  
As the ship fell silent Travis was still thinking about the previous night's movie. It had been an absolutely dreadful B horror film, but he couldn't stop replaying it in his mind.  
  
His thoughts stopped dead in their tracks. How entirely inappropriate to be thinking about comedy zombies at a time like this. His thoughts dishonoured his fallen comrades.  
  
Tears welled up, surprising him. He hadn't really stopped and thought about Rick or Collum in weeks. Their absence had become a background to ordinary life, to navigational diagnostics and zombie movies. The raw shock of their deaths, the suddenness with which two Suliban phaser blasters had stolen them, was already gone.  
  
Life had gone on, but still there remained a haunted gap. When he walked into a room full of junior officers he had to make a physical effort not to notice their absence.  
  
A tear spilled over and ran down his cheek. There was no way to hide it. He caught Hoshi's eye and she relaxed her fixed, expressionless gaze to give him a brief flicker of a smile. Her silent support was too much for him and he closed his eyes, trying to sniff soundlessly.  
  
+++++  
  
From space almost any world looked serene, thought Hoshi. But at Myeppa the battle scars had been visible even from Enterprise's vantage point in high orbit. Dust clouds shrouded cities, huge craters pocked the landscape. They had calculated that the number of lifesigns on the planet was one third the number that should have been necessary to build a civilisation on that scale. So very much death.  
  
That had been six weeks ago, but the voices of the Myeppan people still haunted her. Through the whistles and screams of interference in the faint radio signals she fancied she could detect fear and panic even in the unfamiliar guttural language. She had felt a connection with those frightened radio operators she had never seen.  
  
She had been able to translate very little of what they were saying, but it appeared to be mostly military jargon. Even the language had been bastardised to serve the needs of war.  
  
Enterprise had turned its back on the planet, reprieved to go by their very powerlessness to bring peace or end hatred. Hoshi had wondered privately whether the fighting would stop before there was no-one left alive.  
  
She glanced to her right and saw the gleam of a tear on Travis's cheek. She caught his eye and felt instantly sorry for intruding on private grief. She smiled, something between encouragement and an apology.  
  
+++++  
  
T'Pol stood at attention. The sparse ceremony, the brief plaintive tune followed by this silence, seemed untypical of the humans. It was far removed from the sentimental grief she had seen at other occasions marking death and loss. For once the intent seemed to be to maintain control of the emotions, to reflect on the meaning of death in conflict.  
  
Trying to participate, she made the effort to remember the wars in her own culture. It was many centuries since Vulcan had intentionally killed Vulcan in brutal angry wars.  
  
There were also the thousands of Vulcans who had died defending their world from alien invaders. There was no reason there for sorrow. They had made the logical decision, knowing full well that the needs of the many outweighed the needs of the few. There were no Vulcan ceremonies to commemorate their sacrifice.  
  
She knew that she did not wish to die, but she had thrown herself into the line of fire to save another. It had not mattered to her then whether anyone would remember her, it occurred to her that if she died as a member of this crew she would be remembered, for as long as any of the crew of the Enterprise lived.  
  
+++++  
  
Phlox hovered awkwardly near the turbolift door. He felt out of place on the bridge but he had accepted the captain's invitation to join the senior crew for the minute's silence.  
  
This quiet stoic grief was mysterious. The Denobulans held a similar memorial day, but they did not stand to attention, each lost in his thoughts while time seemed frozen. They held each other and sang the names of their war dead loud and clear.  
  
But sometimes alone in the quiet dark, when there was no-one to hold and no songs would come, he would hear the desperate calls of generations of those who had died crying out on the battlefield for a doctor. Or he would see the faces of two young Enterprise officers for whom all he could do was sign a death certificate.  
  
They were clever sometimes these humans. They brought the silence out of the dark so that it was no longer alone.  
  
+++++  
  
Ensign Owen lifted his bugle and released the crew back into their lives with the first notes of the reveille.  
  
They were the living. Forgetfulness was their privilege. 


End file.
